


Vancouver

by butwordsarewind (sungabraverday)



Series: Cities Headcanons [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Paris Burning (thecitysmith)
Genre: Cities, F/M, Gen, Personification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 16:05:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/838764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sungabraverday/pseuds/butwordsarewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vancouver is glorious, a true world-class city, they all say. That doesn't mean that it never hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vancouver

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Paris Burning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/825130) by [thecitysmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecitysmith/pseuds/thecitysmith). 



  
   

Vancouver braids her long black hair and does yoga on the beach. It’s calming, soothing, and sometimes it helps to forget that not so far from where she stands her people are shooting heroin into their veins. Sometimes it makes it worse.

She loves the outdoors, here between the heavens and the sea, and she has all her life. It used to be quiet and still, a long time ago, just a few village settlements, not even lived in year round, where the people she thought to call her own would go in the summer months to comb the mudflats. They gave her a cedar loghouse of her own and left her in peace, and in the summer seasons she would go out with them, gathering supplies for winter. They told stories about her, their mysterious unaging girl, called her the cousin of Raven, the trickster. 

Now they call her a world-class City. They paint her streets with shades of blue and white and green and say they are celebrating her, and the glories of sport. They aren’t really, just the veneer of who they think she is, but for two weeks the sheer euphoria of her people gets her so high she almost doesn’t feel the pain.

She goes missing for three days after it all ends, and turns up quaking with cold and sorrow under the Olympic Cauldron with fresh bruises and a patchy memory.

From all over, they write to her, the other Cities, and wish her congratulations on shining so brightly. Moscow and London and Seoul and Tokyo and Atlanta and Berlin and Sydney and Salt Lake and Oslo and Torino and Paris and even Athens offer their consolations on the hangover, and a few tips when they have them. Mostly they can only offer sympathy.

The next time she turns up under the cauldron with fresh burns up her side, she’s raving. “It should have been different, it should have been beautiful. It should have been happy!” She’s sobbing too, and her minders take her home, and drag her around the following day, trying to show her how her people still care. They’re sweeping up the broken glass and cleaning up the pieces with perfect smooth brushstrokes and notes scrawled on the plywood boards. Vancouver tries to smile, but she can’t. Frustrated, her minders send her over to visit Ottawa for some kind of reassurance or scolding.

But Ottawa loves her hockey too, and she has no intention of telling Vancouver off. Nor is she the best person to offer consolation, though she knows that there are people who object that a city would not be closest to the other cities of their country. Instead, she sends Vancouver off with a hug and a ticket to Seattle, and a five day headstart on her minders. Seattle meets her at the airport with open arms and matching scars.

There is little that can bond two cities so tightly together as fires roaring through their streets and destroying the hearts of their homes and killing their people within just three years of each other. But there is something, and that is adding losing huge numbers of their people to the same smallpox disease, and being the first other cities that they knew existed, and the earth below them quaking and bringing down their oldest buildings, and matching political and social unrest in their people to the fires. Vancouver and Seattle have borne so much at nearly identical times that they do not need to explain these things. They just understand.

It’s not to say that they get along perfectly. They compete for attention from everyone else, of course, and claim superiority each over the other constantly in hundreds of different metrics, but they’re… they’re as much like siblings as any Cities might be like siblings. Or perhaps they’re more like lovers. (He calls her Granville sometimes, when she’s wrapped in his arms, that name the rest of them have long-since forgotten. They’re more like lovers.)

She goes home, eventually, because they need her there, and because they do love her. She wishes she was strong enough to have been there when they needed her most. She’s like a little doll they parade around when they need her to look pretty, and when they need her to be strong, she shatters under the pressure. She goes home because she knows she is more than that, and she has the scars to prove it.

Vancouver lets her hair float free as she does yoga on the grassy field near the old cedar loghouse that she still calls home. People come and watch her, and she loses herself in the movements and the breaths and the stillness. When the fresh sea air, buoyed with the soft scents of the forest, hits her lungs, she can hardly feel the tension in her scars.


End file.
